The Faded Sun Trilogy Read Free Page A

promised—saw mirrored her own self, before Nisren’s fall, before the ruin of the House and of her own hopes. The sight wounded her. In this moment she saw clearly, and knew the sen’e’en as she was, and feared her and love her at once.
    Melein who would hardly mourn her passing.
    So she had created her, deliberately, event by event, choice by choice, her daughter-not-of-the-flesh, her child, her Chosen, formed in Kath and Kel and Sen, partaker of the Mysteries of all castes of the People.
    Hating her.
    “Learn restraint,” she earnestly wished Melein, in a still, soft voice that thrust with difficulty into Melein’s anger. “Learn to be sen’e’en, Melein, above all else that you desire to have.”
    The young sen’e’en let go a shuddering breath, and the tears in her eyes spilled over. Thwarted for now, the sen’e’en for a moment being child again: but this child was dangerous.
    Intel shivered, foreknowing that Melein would outlive her and impose her own imprint on the world.

Chapter Two
    There was a division in the world, marked by a causeway of white rock. On the one side, and at the lower end, lay the regul of Kesrith—city-folk, slow-moving, long-remembering. The lowland city was entirely theirs: flat, sprawling buildings, a port, commerce with the stars, mining that scarred the earth, a plant that extracted water from the Alkaline Sea. The land had been called the Dus plain before there were regul on Kesrith: the mri remembered. For this reason the mri had avoided the plain, in respect of the dusei; but the regul had insisted on setting their city there, and the dusei left it.
    Uplands, in the rugged hills at the other end of the causeway, was the tower of the mri. It appeared as four truncated cones arising from the corners of a trapezoidal ground floor—slanted walls made of the pale earth of the lowlands, treated and hardened. This was the Edun Kesrithun, the House of Kesrith, the home of the mri of Kesrith, and, because of Intel, the home of all mri in the wide universe.
    One could see most of Kesrithi civilization from the vantage point Niun occupied in his solitary anger. He came here often, to this highest part of the causeway, to this stubborn outcrop of rock that had defeated the regul road and made the regul think otherwise about their plans to extend it into the high hills, invading the sanctity of Sil’athen. He liked it for what it was as well as for the view. Below him lay the regul city and the mri edun, two very small scars on the body of the white earth. Above him, in the hills, and beyond and beyond, there were only regul automatons, that drew minerals from the earth and provided regul Kesrith its reason for existence; and wild things that had owned the world before the coming of regul or of mri; and the slow-moving dusei that had once been Kesrith’s highest form of life.
    Niun sat, brooding, on the rock that overlooked the world, hating tsi’mri with more than the ordinary hatredof mri for aliens, which was considerable. He was twenty-six years old as the People reckoned years, which was not by Kesrith’s orbit around Arain, nor by the standard of Nisren, nor by that of either of the two other worlds the People had designated homeworld in the span of time remembered by Kel songs.
    He was tall, even of his kind. His high cheekbones bore the
seta’al,
the triple scars of his caste, blue-stained and indelible; this meant that he was a full-fledged member of the Kel, the hand of the People. Being of the Kel, he went robed from collar to boot-tops in unrelieved black; and black veil and tasseled headcloth,
mez
and
zaidhe,
concealed all but his brow and his eyes from the gaze of outsiders when he chose to meet them; and the
zaidhe
further had a dark transparent visor that could meet the veil when dust blew or red Arain reached its unpleasant zenith. He was a man: his face, like his thoughts, was considered a private identity, one indecent to reveal to strangers. The veils enveloped